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[Corpal]

Hi, guys!

We started with a project called "Melbits POD".
It's like a blend of Tamagotchi and Pokémon with an AR twist.

It combines a video game with a sensor filled egg shaped device. The goal is to evolve, hatch and take care of hundreds of procedurally generated kawaii creatures called Melbits. How? By incubating them in the real world using your surroundings. Dancing in the Dark, Resting in the Sun, Find a cold bright spot, each combination of sensors will result in a one-of-a-kind evolution. Add customization, AR walks, trading, hundreds of incubations, Viruses and a whole new Internet fantasy.


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What's going on right now?

GDD is done and we have covered the basic core gameplay. Now we're prototyping additional features like AR walks, weather features, minigames and cares for the Melbits. After looking for funding in Kickstarter to create the first batch of PODs, now we're manufacturing the first batch of PODs and developing the companion game. We can find more info about the POD here:

https://melbitspod.com/

[Corpal]

Designed with magic: How our procedural virtual pets evolve

As you know, the Melbits Pod is a physical-digital game that uses a device equipped with temperature, light and motion sensors, but how do we translate those inputs into a new creature? Today I'll explain how a Melbit is born!

First, a bit of history

With the Melbits POD, you can hatch well.. Melbits as its name says. But what are they? Well, Melbits are digital pixies.

The whole idea came from wanting to put a contemporary spin on traditional fantasy characters like gnomes, elves or mogwais, and look at how those creatures could protect the digital world from evil forces like viruses, trolls, hackers and so on.

Procedural evolution: Mutations vs Evolutionary Tree

As it turns out, bridging the gap between the physical and digital worlds is no easy task! Melbits are sneaky creatures and it’s quite hard to transport them safely.

If we think about other families of digital creatures such as Pokémon, Digimon, TemTem or Tamagotchi we can see that they all start with an initial form that will later evolve into a new creature.

Traditionally these evolutions come "predefined" in a linear evolutionary tree, that is, we can evolve from creature A to B or by bifurcating their possible evolutions so that from creature A we can obtain B, C and D.

In Melbits Pod it is the player who decides how their virtual pet will evolve. Instead of evolving from a default Melbit A to a default Melbit B, we will try to make the main characteristics that give it personality represent the information obtained from the player's incubation with the Melbits Pod.

To do this, we work with mutations, or in other words, variations of the different parts that define a Melbit's appearance: the shape of the face, facial features and color, ears/antennas/hairstyle, arms, body color, and even his attitude to other Melbits, his tastes, or his personality in general.

For example: This Melbit will mutate in a specific way if 3 degrees are applied but it will mutate differently if 25 degrees are applied.

By assigning a particular input obtained with the Melbits Pod to a Melbit feature we can get a lot of different combinations and therefore the variety of Melbits is multiplied. These inputs come from how we manipulate the Melbits Pod when a Melbit is being incubated but we also consider variations associated with time of day or even geographical location.

Here are some incubations examples to evolve Melbits using the Melbits Pod.

What do you think? Do you like this evolution system? How could we improve it? ^^

[Corpal]

Growing up

Now we know how some aspects of Melbit are defined during an evolutionary phase. But Melbits have different phases:

• Seed: Minimum expression of a Melbit that defines its family and which is the main sensor that will affect its evolution. Seeds are not built from different assets but are a blank canvas and their body parts are yet to be defined.
• Pup: The Melbit puppy has the first features and defines its final appearance when it reaches adulthood.
• Adult: Melbit in its definite and complete form.

We will have to evolve our Melbit first from seed to pup and then from pup to adult.

One of the virtues of this system is that it allows us to define different rules for different stages of the evolution of a Melbit. We can say that a sensor that at one stage affected the ears now affects the face or we can change the range of values of the spectrum in which we will move. Finally, we will associate lists of assets from a particular stage to an asset from the immediately preceding stage to maintain the coherence of the evolutionary process.
Encoding a Melbit

We can define a Melbit as "the set of its mutations". We could have only its family and the inputs obtained during its incubation for each evolutionary phase and we could already reconstruct it just by following the rules we have defined.

Evolving in a linear way is justified when we have only one input (for example, combat experience). But if we have several inputs we can combine them to get a much more organic system. If we balance well the way we read those inputs and transform them into mutations we can set different challenges and graduate their difficulty during the whole life cycle of the character. This approach means we can get the most out of the Melbits Pod, make the experience playable, and be surprised every time we pick up the Melbits Pod to see what we've got.

So this is how we do it, hope you like it!